


Dreaming

by bendingwind



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Abduction, Angst, Dubious Consent, Fix-It, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Shapeshifting, Spoilers, This is the one with the skrulls., Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-04 19:50:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the person sleeping beside you was never who you thought he was?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nightmare

He started the morning in Phil’s obscenely comfortable bed, trying to camouflage himself against the sheets well enough for Phil to forget about him and let him get some sleep. It took a few kisses to convince him that that wasn’t gonna happen, and a few more plus the promise of coffee and bacon to get him out of bed. Phil was relaxed; this was a part of their routine and Phil had not-so-stealthily inched up the start to his morning to make allowances. The coffee had been awesome, the bacon only slightly burned, and Clint had decided that cinnamon toast was absolutely necessary to his continued existence. It said a lot about their time together that Phil now kept his pantry well-stocked with assorted Weird Things Clint Was Likely To Want For Breakfast.

He’d thought, throwing a bemused smile at Phil over Phil’s bowl of super-healthy-slash-super-gross vegan cereal, that he’d like to spend every morning for the rest of his life just like this.

Phil had given him a quick kiss just inside the door and they headed off for the day, Phil to drive his plain silver car to SHIELD headquarters and Clint to catch a bus.

Must have been goddamned karma or a jinx or something, because the day went to shit from there.

* * *

It was an accident, actually, the discovery of Phil Coulson: Alien Agent. There were shape-shifting aliens stirring up shit on the West Coast, so Reed and Tony were not-so-subtly competing to see who could build the best shape-shifter detector in the shortest amount of time.

And Tony pointed his at Phil.

At first, everyone had just stared. Phil had looked down at his hands, grimaced, and frowned with deep disapproval at Tony.

“Your ‘alien detector’ seems to have turned me into one,” Phil said, evenly. Clint was completely prepared for this, he’d been preparing for this for his _entire life,_ he had so many jokes just for—

“Arrest him,” Natasha had said, deadpan.

Clint had rolled his eyes at Natasha’s joke and opened his mouth to spit out a wise-crack at the junior agents who stepped forward to _actually obey her orders_ because they were so green they didn’t know a joke when they heard one—

And then Phil had punched the nose of the younger agent into his skull with a thick, dull crunch that Clint had heard a dozen times before. The other agent, a kid who had to be barely out of college, leapt back, and Natasha moved in with a speed even Clint’s well-adjusted eyes couldn’t follow. For half a second the only thing that existed in the world was the meaty sound of flesh hitting flesh, and then there was a yelp and another crack of breaking bone. And then they weren’t moving anymore, and Phil was in a headlock with an arm that looked pretty damn broken.

Clint’s mouth was still open, his joke still on the tip of his tongue.

Natasha waved the surviving junior agent closer. She came, stepping over the bloody body of her dead friend, and fastened restraints around Phil’s wrists with visibly trembling hands.

They were on the uppermost level of SHIELD, and there was a window. The light streamed through, casting golden shadows on Phil’s face, and Clint wondered how long it would be before Phil woke him up from this particular nightmare.

“I killed a suspected spy a few months ago in Hungary,” Natasha said, as she heaved the thing to its feet. Its face, too much like Phil’s if Phil had green skin and a weird bumpy chin, contorted in a grimace of pain. “When his heart stopped beating, he reverted to a form very similar to this. I have been investigating under Director Fury’s orders, and I think, gentlemen, that this is a good indication that we have a full-scale invasion on our hands.”

Moments like this held a sort of crystal-clarity in Clint’s mind, the way the day-to-day shuffling from place to place completely eluded him.

He half-remembered Cap insisting that they inform Fury, at once, and sort of hauling him along to the debriefing room. He found himself seated around the large, circular table (Phil had nudged him and grinned when Fury had said, “This damn round table does not make you my fucking knights. There is no equality in this institution, there are _orders._ ”) with Cap and Fury arguing on the other side.

“He’s one of my men, and I am _going_ to save him,” Cap insisted, all innocent superboy charm. Fury looked pretty damn unimpressed, which would have been funnier if Clint didn’t feel quite so numb.

He took a deep breath. Any minute, Phil would wake him with a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss and complain that Clint kicked when he had nightmares, and then ask what he’d been dreaming of. And Clint would smile and lean into the kiss and say, _Nothing._

“We’re at a huge disadvantage as it is, Captain Rogers,” Fury said. “I’m _not_ gonna let whatever the fuck we’re dealing with here know that _we_ know, just to stage some damn fool rescue mission for an agent who is probably already dead. Agent Coulson would be the first man to say that you’re all acting like you’ve got your heads up your asses.” 

The glare Fury leveled at Cap would have caused a lesser superhero to flinch. Instead, Cap stood straight and his eyes flashed, like something out of one of the novels Phil liked.

“All due respect, sir, but I didn’t ask how Agent Coulson would feel about it. I am going after him.”

They glared at each other across the table as Clint watched with a sort of tingling horror. Phil had been fine this morning, better than fine, perfect—and now, suddenly he’d been in danger for maybe even dead for _months_ and Clint hadn’t known.

He still hadn’t woken up.

“We have to face the possibility that we fucked up and Agent Coulson has been an inside agent for these aliens since the beginning of his association with SHIELD,” Fury insists, glaring across the table, “or was replaced by one sometime after we recruited him.”

All the times Phil could have died, probably _should_ have, flashed across Clint’s memory like some sort of nightmare reel.

Fury and Cap were still arguing—“very real possibility that the human Philip Coulson is dead. A rescue mission is obviously out of the question, Captain, and I’d appreciate it if you’d shut the fuck up and follow orders.”

“You and I both know that’s not going to happen, Director,” Cap said, leveling a more powerful level of serious stare at Fury.

“I don’t think you can actually stop us,” Tony butted in, from his seat beside Cap. “I, for one, think my life would be totally incomplete without someone to threaten me with tasers and Supernanny, and I’ll fly Cap out there whether we have your permission or not.”

“You always were a shit team player, Stark,” Fury bit out. Tony threw his arms up in a manner that, on anyone else, might have been a dramatic, innocent shrug.

“Hey, I’m totally a team player, look at me assembling a team. Hey, Natasha, wanna come with? See? I’m just not very good at being _your_ team player.”

On the other side of Fury, Natasha was surveying Clint with a strange look in her eyes. When he met her gaze, she looked away and stood.

“Iron Man, the Captain and I will take a jet and scan for Agent Coulson’s SHIELD-issue tracking system in the area immediately surrounding the base where I took out the first alien. Stealth will be key; I think it’s best if Hulk remains behind and Iron Man, barring serious complication, remains in the jet,” she declared.

At the insinuation that he wouldn’t be _right damn there next to them_ looking for Phil, something seemed to snap inside him, and the world moved from blurred and sort of unreal to sharp and focused.

“I’m going too,” he informed her, with a glare daring her to argue. She met him with the cool, level gaze she did so well.

“You are not. I’m benching you for this mission.”

“You don’t have the right—” he started, because years of partnership did not mean she got to boss him around when his—when _Phil’s_ life was in danger.

“I don’t, but you’ve been sleeping with Coulson for six months, and I think the rest of the team will agree that your feelings would cause you to be a liability to this mission.” Her voice was as sharp and precise as he had ever heard it, and he fought back the desire to flinch.

“Is that true?” Fury asked, directing his glare straight at Clint. Clint… couldn’t bring himself to lie about loving a man who was probably ( _God_ ) dead, and may have been dead since long before he’d had the chance to meet Clint. Was he in love with an alien infiltrator, then? Did it still count, if Phil had been an alien set on conquering earth all along, and did it count if it had only been the alien for a little while?

He was going to give himself a damn migraine or possibly jump off a tall building if he didn’t get off his ass and _do_ something.

“I want to go, sir,” he bit out.

Fury stared at him across the table for what felt like a thousand fucking years. Even one eye down, the man had a serious Stare.

“Hell no, Barton. Consider yourself benched. I’m sure Miss Lewis can find you some paperwork on inter-office relationships to fill out while you wait.”

“With all due respect, sir—”

“You haven’t respected me a day in your goddamn life, Barton, don’t start now. You heard me; you’re benched until further notice. Get out of my sight, I don’t want you hearing any specifics and trying some damn fool thing like following them.”

Clint considered it, briefly, but at heart he was pretty practical; the jets were too small to sneak aboard without detection and unless he could figure out how to fly really fast, he had no chance in hell of following them. He pulled himself to his feet and stood there for a moment, shaking hands gripping the table like it might anchor him in place.

Fury cleared his throat, pointedly, and Clint left the room. The door banged shut behind him in a way that sounded unusually loud, and he wondered if he’d slammed it accidentally.

Half an hour and a few very worn-down floor tiles later, the team emerged. Bruce shot him a worried, pitying look before taking off in the direction of his lab, a sheet of paper Clint recognized as a biological sample requisition form in his hands. Tony clapped him on the shoulder and favored him with his patented apologetic eyes, and Steve actually _hugged_ him, what the fuck. The desire to hug back and find comfort in Steve’s embrace was more embarrassing than the actual hug. Fury didn’t acknowledge him at all, and Natasha—

Natasha sighed and squeezed his arm gently.

“If he can be brought back, Clint, I’ll bring him back for you,” she promised, and something hard and painful squeezed around the hollow in his chest. It felt like drowning.

“Thanks,” he said, and was surprised to hear his own voice come out as a whisper.

She nodded at him, once, and followed Steve and Tony down the corridor at a brisk pace. For a moment Clint was seized with the urge to follow them and _beg_ them to take him along, but they turned the corner and the urge disappeared. He leaned back against the wall and sunk, quietly, onto the floor.

He probably lost some time there, because the next thing he was aware of, his stomach was signaling that he was fucking starving, that cinnamon toast (and Phil’s warm, friendly kitchen, could that have been just this morning?) had been an age ago.

He pulled himself to his feet, slow with exhaustion. He’d fought fucking battles and felt less tired than a morning of sitting around and talking had left him, he thought. He felt… _lost,_ as he made his way through corridors that were as familiar to him as the back of his hand, down to the SHIELD cafeteria. The food was shit, but it was good old-fashioned American shit, and Clint could keep anything down.

The room died down to whispers as he walked in. For a moment he wondered, irrationally, how the word had spread so quickly that he’d been sleeping with his former handler.

He caught the barest hint of someone on the other side of the room whispering, “Why isn’t he with the others looking for Agent Coulson?”

He walked up to the food lady, the same one who’d been there ever since he’d been recruited, and took the food she slopped onto his tray. There was a table with an empty corner halfway across the room; he made a beeline for it and watched as the agents on the other end stuffed what they could into their mouths and scrambled away.

Chatter slowly resumed, and from another table, he heard; “Man, Coulson was his handler for _years,_ I can’t believe he’s just sitting there eating lunch. If it were me, I’d be tearing things up looking for my partner.”

Clint hung his head and took another bite of his food.

“I heard Agent Coulson was dead,” another person said, “The alien killed him before it took his place, and _no one even noticed the switch._ You guys would notice if I got switched out for an evil invading alien, right?” There was fear in the young voice, and Clint wanted to punch him, beat the innocence and naiveté straight out of the kid. Of course they wouldn’t notice, that was the mark of a good infiltrator, they _couldn’t_ notice—unless, of course, they did.

He set his fork down, stood, and left the cafeteria. As he passed through the doors he heard someone behind him say, “They’re keeping it in Detention Block Eleven, isolated from other prisoners, for interrogation. No access, but I bet—”

And, just like that, Clint had something he could do to help whatever might be left of Phil.

The detention cells are an area of SHIELD with which he is intimately familiar. With Natasha and Phil, he was one third of the best interrogation team SHIELD had. Was, past tense. He gritted his teeth and kept moving.

Sharon, the pretty guard on duty, let him in without much fuss. Clearly Fury hadn’t thought to block off his access to the prisoner. It was sitting in a cell halfway down Block Eleven, behind laser bars that must have come straight out of Star Wars, still looking too much like Phil if Phil had green skin and barnacles growing out of his face.

“What are you?” Clint blurted out, all finesse lost the instant he saw that too-wrong face. He probably should have asked another question first, gone for a better interrogation strategy, since apparently this was all he was going to be allowed to do to help Phil, but—he’d _fucked_ this thing.

God, he’d fucked an alien, and he’d _loved every minute of it._

“I am Agent Philip Coulson of SHIELD,” the thing informed him in the iron tones Phil always assumed when he repeated the default mantra of a captured SHIELD agent. “I believe I have been betrayed by Agent Natasha Romanoff, also known as Black Widow, in a set-up designed to frame me as an invading alien in disguise. I recently recovered information indicating that she may be operating as a double agent for HYDRA. I would like to speak to Director Fury… please.”

Clint glared at it. Whatever it was, it looked painfully composed as it sat there, wrists crossed neatly in its lap so that the restraints wouldn’t chafe.

“Whatever you are, you aren’t Phil,” Clint growled, angry now. As if he didn’t know Natasha better than that.

“I am Agent Philip Coulson of SHIELD,” the alien repeated, and Clint turned to leave. He could—he could watch from the observation room, give advice, or something, because clearly he wasn’t doing any good here.

“ _Please,_ Clint,” it said, and he froze. “Please, I need you to… to trust me.”

Clint walked out and let the door fall shut behind him. He rested his forehead against the cool wall, shut his eyes, and finally allowed himself to cry.

He managed to gather himself together just in time to avoid awkward questions as a team of interrogators arrived. They looked young and unweathered, and he wondered wearily whether he had ever looked that way.

“Always knew there was something off about Coulson,” one of them mutters to the other as they pass through the doors, and Clint should have won a fucking _award_ for restraining himself from punching the kid’s light out. He left the detention center.

Natasha found him later, sitting on the worn leather sofa in Phil’s office. He knew the answer before she had a chance to open her mouth, but she sat down beside him and told him anyway.

“There isn’t any sign of him, Clint, I… I’m sorry. The agent has been in place for months at least, maybe even… maybe years.”

He nodded, numb once again, and Natasha reached out to run a gentle finger under his eye.

“You’re crying,” she said, sounding almost surprised. “I thought—”

And Clint could only shake his head, unable to meet her eyes.

“I see. He’s been declared KIA. I will... I’ll deal with the arrangements.”

Clint nodded, still unable to make his mouth move or his vocal cords work. It just seemed like so much effort, and he was so _tired._

“Come on,” Natasha said, very quietly, as she pulled him to his feet. “You’ll spend the night at my place. We can work things out tomorrow.”

He fell asleep with Natasha curled around him and wondered how he was supposed to keep living, let alone being Hawkeye: the Avenger, without Phil there to sleep by his side every night.

* * *

Natasha never broke her promises, and she didn’t break this one; she arranged everything. She kept Clint more or less sequestered away in her apartment for the few days it took to arrange Phil’s funeral. It was a quiet affair, military, and it took place on a breezy fall morning as golden leaves floated around them. Very poetic, Phil would have liked it.

The grave was empty.

After, Natasha took his arm and tried to steer him away from the others before they had a chance to pounce, but Fury was clearly onto her, as he made a beeline straight for Clint.

“You’ve got another week,” he announced, cutting them off from the somber line of cars, “And then I expect you back. Is that going to be a problem?”

Natasha made a noise like she might protest, but Clint cut her off.

“No, sir,”

She leveled a look at him, and he shrugged. He wanted— _needed_ to be back at work. It hadn’t taken long to discover that he needed to be functioning, doing things, because otherwise all he could do was sit there and remember life with a man who may have not even existed. And, more than anything, Clint needed access to the alien. He needed to know how much of it had been real, and how much had just been a fabrication, and there was only one person who could tell him.

And maybe… maybe it had been the alien all along. Maybe the man he loved wasn’t dead, but sitting in a detention cell in SHIELD, waiting for another round of interrogation. The thought was terrifying and sickening and thrilling, all at once, and Clint almost itched with the desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

Clint hadn’t finished assessing just how fucked up this situation was, but he knew one thing; if that alien was even a bit the man he loved, he was worth saving. It was the right thing to do; he knew it because even the thought of it made some of the weariness slough away, let him feel like maybe it was worth living after all, and that was all the moral compass Clint had ever needed.

Natasha led him away before Tony’s “Hey, _hey,_ did Coulson watch Supernanny in the sack because I’ve been wondering—” could catch up with them. They were a team and all, but sometimes Clint just wanted to shoot his teammates.

He didn’t wait a week. The next morning, he slipped into the passenger seat of Natasha’s car, stared her down for a second, and the two of them went to work. They met in the debriefing room to discuss the alien threat and formulate strategy, and Clint knew he was mostly useless, but Fury wouldn’t expect anything different and he couldn’t tear his mind away from the thought of the alien sitting downstairs, hands folded neatly in his lap, eerily familiar green face carefully composed. He slipped out the moment the meeting was adjourned, apparently still benched from fighting, and made his way to the detention center.

The alien was still sitting there, composed, and it offered him a tentative smile when he pulled a chair up in front of its cage.

“It’s nice to see you, Clint,” it said, slowly. “I was worried.”

“Yeah?” Clint asked, raising an eyebrow. It could be lying. He wanted to believe that it wasn’t, but—well, it was an invading alien.

“They told me that my funeral was yesterday,” it answered, wryly. “It’s not every day, I suppose, that one gets notice of one’s own funeral.”

“No, I guess not.”

“You look tired, and I can tell you haven’t been eating. I haven’t seen you like this since Moscow,” it continued, disapproval mixing with concern and coating every word. He was too used to hearing that same tone from Phil, and he couldn’t stop himself from leaning away.

“I can take care of myself.”

The alien, as if to counter his movement, leaned forward.

“Clint, please, I need you to trust me. I understand why it’s hard, since I look like—like _this_ —but please, anything. Ask me, whatever you want, anything that only I could know.”

Clint didn’t ask, that day, though he stayed and spoke to it for nearly two hours, nominally trying to gain more information about the potential invasion. Mostly he just desperately needed to know where the Phil he loved left off and where this… thing… picked up.

His leave of absence sped by, and by the end of the week he was back in the field. Fury liked to force his agents to hit the ground running; he spent three weeks in Hungary sniffing out leads with Natasha, and two weeks after that following the trail of a suspected shape-shifter. It was surprisingly less composed than the alien that had been Phil when they captured it, and they learned at least the name of the aliens invading their planet; the Skrull.

They were extracted the day after, and Clint went immediately from the helipad to the detention block.

“So, I finally got my question answered,” he announced, once again pulling a chair up in front of his alien. “You’re a skrull.”

It gave him a flat look, for just a moment, and then glanced away.

“Alright, yes,” it admitted, “I’m sorry. We’re not an invasion, we’re just here to… there aren’t many of us left, we just wanted a place to, to finish out our lives, as it were. I didn’t lie, exactly; I _am_ Phil Coulson. I just changed my face around a bit. I’m still… I’m still _me,_ Clint, and you have to trust me; Natasha is a traitor.”

“Nice try,” Clint ground out. “I’ve known Natasha a damn sight longer than I’ve known you, and she’s never lied to me once since we became partners, which is more than I can say for you.”

“I didn’t lie,” it repeated.

“Damn well feels like it,” someone shouted, and after a moment Clint realized that it was him; he had risen to his feet and was towering over the alien, sheltered behind its laser bars. It stared up at him, more sad that Clint had ever seen that almost-familiar, composed face before.

“I am... I’m sorry, Clint,” it said, hanging its head. “I didn’t feel that I had a choice.”

Clint wasn’t sure what to say in the face of its apology, and he never figured it out; Natasha slid into the room and frowned at him.

“Did you know you technically don’t have clearance to be in here? Come on, we’ve been called out again.”

Clint shrugged at the alien and followed her away.

He didn’t get breaks often, as surveillance turned into skirmishes turned into outright war, but sometimes he would find his way down to the detention block to talk to not-Phil, who did his utmost to convince Clint that he was a real boy.

Some days (most days) Clint left with hope allowing him to half-believe the words not-Phil said to him, but then he’d have to fight off another hoard of skrull, and he’d remember that it was all make-believe. A dream he’d had, never real, and the only thing that hadn’t been a nightmare at all.

He had far too much love and the only object for him to bestow it on was a skrull who may or may not have been the person he fell in love with, and in any case was the enemy.

Sometimes, when he was falling asleep at night in the SHIELD-issue apartment he’d moved into after Phil’s comfortable bed in his comfortable apartment had been sold in an estate sale, he wondered if after the war they’d leave the skrull down there for him to talk to, when he needed to just… when he needed to hear Phil’s voice and feel like he hadn’t lost everything. And then he turned over and buried his head in his pillow in shame, and willed himself to fall asleep. It never came easy.

And then, one day, the war was over, and Iron Man and Captain America brought back the people the skrulls had replaced, stored safely in green stasis pods. Phil had been in his for eleven months. He must have been taken weeks or even days before Clint and he had... well.

Clint sat by his sterile hospital bed and snapped at the nurses and demanded updates from the doctors until Natasha came in and chased him away, and then he took the lifts down to the detention block for the final time.

“I hear you found the real Philip Coulson,” the skrull said, with a voice and a cruel smirk that were entirely new. “I feel quite foolish for having spent so much time trying to convince you that I was innocent and that you should free me.”

“You think I’m really stupid, don’t you?” Clint asked, after a while. The skrull tilted its head again, still smiling its cruel smile.

“Yes,” it answered. “So stupid, and so easy to fool. The first rule of infiltration; change the relationships with the people closest to the human you are emulating. You never wondered or asked or considered why a man who had never so much as given you an appreciative look was suddenly in love with you? All my slip-ups and failures, you dismissed as being due to the change in our relationship. You even made excuses for me to your pretty little assassin friend, when she came asking questions. You made it so very easy for me, Clint Barton, because you’re still just a sad little circus boy SHIELD picked up for his brawn rather than his brains.”

Clint sucked in a breath. The insults were nothing; he’d heard worse and honestly, they were probably true. Even so, to hear so bluntly that none of it had been real, those ridiculously perfect six months where Phil had loved him and he had loved Phil, that it was all designed to keep him from asking too many questions, was nearly more than he could bear.

But Phil was _alive,_ and likely to remain that way, and Clint was willing to trade any level of heartbreak on his part just to see Phil scowling at him over paperwork every day.

“I’m not sorry for any of it,” Clint said, quietly, and he spoke to himself as much as to the skrull. “I’m not sorry about… whatever it was that you made me think I had. He’s fine, he’s safe, and you’re going to be locked away down here until they forget to stop the mad scientists in R&D from taking you away to cut you open and study you, and me? I’m going to be up there, by his side, watching his back like I always have.”

“He won’t love you,” the skrull snarled. “When you watch his back, you think of me, reaming your tight ass and fingering you till you came from that alone, yeah? And I’ll be _long dead_ before you forget what I made you think you had.”

Clint nodded, and left, back to the hospital block to wear a hole in the floor outside Phil’s room and maybe snap at some nurses and a doctor or two.

When Phil opened his eyes two days later to find Clint disheveled and sleep-deprived, sitting by his bedside, his eyes held none of the familiar warmth Clint had come to count on when he had thought they were together, just the bland curiosity Phil had always shown as his handler.

“Welcome back, Agent Coulson,” he said with a smile.


	2. Falling

The details filtered out over the weeks that followed, through rumor and gossip and a brief conversation with the man himself. It took some time for Clint to get used to thinking of and calling him Coulson rather than Phil, but he’d always been good at compartmentalizing, and he adjusted easily enough. Clint rode high on the wave of joy that he was alive while the people around him relayed the story; SHIELD’s best agent, snatched from the jaws of death after the accident with Loki, saved to have his memories extracted and replaced with a skrull agent. It took most of his willpower to avoid following Coulson around like a little lost puppy, and if he was found sprawled on the couch in his office sorting his paperwork for him a few times too many, Coulson was kind enough not to say anything about it.

“I missed you,” Clint told Coulson, almost shyly, one afternoon weeks after he’d been reinstated as a proper agent of SHIELD.

“Hmm,” Coulson said, shuffling through a stack of paperwork, “Your sudden willingness to not only turn in your paperwork but assist me with mine did clue me in.” He looked up at Clint with an amused tolerance that Clint was very familiar with, but the warm gleam he’d become used to when they were together was absent. Some part of whatever shriveled organ Clint had in place of a heart constricted. Coulson, this Coulson, real and human and not planning to betray his entire species, didn’t love him. Sometimes, it was so easy to forget.

It wasn’t the first time Clint had loved without reciprocation; hell, it wasn’t even the first time he’d loved _Coulson_ without a return of affection. It was almost too easy to slide back into his old routine of covers and lies and doing his very, very best to pretend he just felt a sort of fondness for Coulson as his handler.

“They had Sitwell on our case,” he explained with a grimace that might have been slightly over-exaggerated. “He _nagged._ At least you just let me go hungry until I filed my paperwork so that SHIELD could release my paycheck.”

Coulson gave him an amused chuckle for his efforts.

“And how did Stark react to Sitwell’s nagging?”

“I don’t have _proof_ or anything, but the the last agent Sitwell groped had a taser that looked like Starktech to me, and Sitwell was in medical for the entire afternoon.” Clint grinned at Coulson over a stack of papers, “Lewis is _badass_.”

“I’m aware,” Coulson said, with a fond smile. He glanced up at the clock and then snorted. “And you’re five minutes late for your mandatory psych eval. Don’t tell me you were trying to hide out in here in order to skip.”

Clint favored him with a properly abashed expression. “Oops?” he asked, and Coulson made a shooing motion with his hand that sent Clint gliding out of the room, (nominally) on his way to mandatories.

Everything was… completely normal, and Clint couldn’t stop smiling as he made his way down the hall to the archery range.

At night, Clint dreamt of Coulson dying, all those months ago.

* * *

_\- 1 Year, 1 Week_

It wasn’t what he’d expected. Coulson was in danger all the time, sure, so was Clint. But in all the nightmares he’d had where he’d watched Coulson die, broken and bloody, he’d never imagined that he simply _wouldn’t be there._

They didn’t even let him see the body. If he fought with a fierceness Natasha hadn’t seen in him since he was a kid just off the streets, personally arrested by Coulson, well: he had shit to avenge. And then a heart to try, slowly, to sew back together. It wasn’t the first time he’d lost someone, or even the worst way it had happened. Maybe he was just numb because there was psychopath taking over the world and he was needed more on the battlefield than in the mortuary, so he didn’t have time to grieve. Coulson’s last words had been about pulling the team together, and fuck it, if Clint couldn’t fulfill Coulson’s last wish, what was he good for anyway?

And when he woke up in medical after Natasha drugged him and dragged him back to SHIELD to make sure he didn’t kill himself by neglecting his wounds, he woke up next to Coulson.

“Welcome back, Agent Barton,” Coulson said, ridiculously blithe. Clint pulled himself out of bed, heedless of the wires tangling and breaking around him.

“You’re fucking dead,” he said, voice flat.

“Reports of my demise were grossly exaggerated, I admit,” Coulson said, and okay, _fucking bastard._

Clint punched him in the face.

Clint didn’t calm down until the orderlies had pulled them apart, strapped him down to his hospital bed, and relayed Fury’s threat to separate them permanently. Forget that shit, he wasn’t letting Coulson out of his sight _ever again._

“You didn’t think that maybe I would like to know that you weren’t rotting in the morgue, sir?” Clint bit out, once the orderlies left the room.

“Would you have been as willing to work with Stark and Rogers if you’d known?” Coulson asked.

“ _Yes._ I don’t know if you noticed, sir, but _he stabbed you through the chest.”_

Coulson shrugs. “It’s just a flesh wound, Barton,” he said, and his lips twitched very slightly, and that, okay, _that_ was why Clint had kind of been in love with Agent Coulson Coulson for an embarrassingly long period of time.

“Fuck you,” he said, with feeling, and Coulson laughed aloud.

The orderlies had given Clint some sort of shot, and clearly it was taking effect, because he could feel the world going blurry at the edges and, gradually, he fell asleep.

* * *

Unlike the other Avengers, Clint and Natasha still ran solo missions, and by some dint of luck (or more likely blackmail), Coulson was still their handler. It felt perfectly normal for Clint to drop out of a tree directly in front of Coulson, and laugh when Coulson stared back at him with that unflappable smirk and informed him that he was late, _again._

And it felt terrifyingly normal to, when missions went to shit, curl up in a corner of Coulson’s worn leather couch. It was almost surreal to know that Coulson was still here, and alive, and that he still remembered to bring Clint a cup of hot chocolate, even if Clint couldn’t quite help the level of gratitude and, okay, _love,_ that shone out of his eyes when he did. Coulson always responded with slightly uncomfortable looks, but he still let Clint fall asleep on the couch, listening to the sound of him cleaning his favorite pistol, so Clint thought it was probably okay.

* * *

_-1 Year, 3 Days_

He shouldn’t have done it. It was a Very Bad Idea, and Clint knew that, but Coulson had been _dead,_ and Clint had… had thought he would never see the way Coulson giggled at Monty Python jokes or wore ridiculous old man glasses when he gave himself a paperwork migraine again.

So it was a bad idea, but he knew the whole story now, and the idea that Coulson thought he was _expendable_ to anyone was more than Clint could bear.

He knocked on the door to Coulson’s office, and visibly flinched when Coulson called, “Come in.”

“Barton?” he asked, puzzled, when Clint slipped through the doorway. “I’m sorry, did you just… knock?”

“Er. Maybe?” Clint replied, because hey, he was never going to claim that words were his thing. “So, um, I wanted to tell you something.”

Coulson raised his eyebrows in that way that only he could do quite so eloquently.

“When you… when you gave yourself up to Loki to bring us together, I… I thought… it doesn’t matter. But that you would—I mean, you just let—”

Clint stopped and forced himself to take a deep breath, because clearly not only were words not his thing, he _sucked_ at words.

“What I did was integral to the success of the Avengers,” Coulson filled in his silence. “I do not regret it, and I would do it again if the chance presented itself. The success of the team is more important than my continued activity as an agent of SHIELD.”

And, fuck, but Clint was angry now.

“That’s so, that’s so _fucking stupid,_ ” he roared, and maybe losing his temper was a bad idea, but Clint was full of bad ideas, always had been. “You’re not, you’re not _expendable,_ do you know how fucking much I cannot handle that you think that? I can’t, the team would be nothing, _nothing_ without you!”

He stopped, breathing hard, and glared Coulson down.

“I realize that other agents are less lenient than I am about paperwork, Barton, but I think the team would likely have survived.”

Clint was pretty damn strong, but even he couldn’t upend Coulson’s heavy oak desk. He settled for pounding his fist against it so hard that several papers fluttered up and into Coulson’s lap.

“ _You are not expendable to me,”_ he hissed, and Coulson stared back at him with an expression that, for the first time in years, struck Clint as completely new.

“I—” Coulson began, and his voice was strangely choked.

Clint sagged, and for the first time in his long association with Agent Phil Coulson, sat in one of the chairs across from his desk. He buried his face in his hands and forced himself to speak through the lump in his throat.

“I just, before you go off and get yourself _killed_ again for ‘the greater good’ or some other shit, I wanted you to know that you aren’t, aren’t _expendable._ Someone, someone loves you more than anything in the fucking, fucking _world._ I love you. I mean.”

He didn’t dare look up. Instead, he slumped down onto the table and tried to bury his entire head in his folded arms.

“It’s not, I get it, I know that I’m just the agent you’re in charge of and that you don’t, you know, feel that way. I’m okay with that. But—” and now he made himself, _forced_ himself to look up, because he needed, more than anything, for Coulson to know how he felt. “You aren’t, you won’t ever… you’re _not expendable to me._ Whatever you feel and I feel, it doesn’t matter, but you are, you’re _one of us,_ and dying won’t help us. We— _I_ —wouldn’t be the same without you.”

The way Coulson stared at him was unnerving and frankly a bit frightening. Clint really should have left. He even went to the effort to stand up and start for the door, and then Coulson slipped around his desk with his usual, _insane_ level of secret-agent-speed, and wrapped a hand around Clint’s wrist.

“Did you mean that?” he asked, quiet.

“Yes, sir,” Clint said, eyes downcast. “Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t,” Coulson said, and then he was tugging Clint to face him and, of all things, burying his face in the crook of Clint’s neck.

“I will always feel that it was better me than you,” Coulson said, and Clint was good at denial, but there was no way to deny that Coulson meant _him,_ just him, screw-up agent with an invaluable skill set, not the superhumans or gods or the team as a whole.

“Oh,” he said, and breathed in the scent of Coulson’s hair.

“So, uh… should we like, go on a date or something?” he asked, because he was and always would be the Great Ruiner of Moments.

Coulson laughed into his skin.

* * *

Coulson had been back for a full month, and he had to know by now. Sometimes Clint caught him frowning at him out of the corner of his eye, and it terrified him that Coulson knew and didn’t feel the same. It hurt to breathe, knowing that he would never be held in those arms again or run his fingers down that skin or know what Coulson’s eyes looked like when they lit up with love, but… but he could be okay with that. He’d survived years of loving Coulson quietly before all of this started, he could manage again, if only he could be there by his side, watching his back and listening to his jokes.

Coulson didn’t seem very amenable to that. Clint wasn’t perfect and it was impossible now to always hide what he felt. More and more often, he caught himself revealing just a little too much, and watched Coulson recoil more and more quickly each time.

Two months after Coulson came back from the dead, he asked that a new agent be assigned to oversee Hawkeye’s solo missions.

Clint went to a bar and got spectacularly drunk.

* * *

_\- 11 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days_

To their surprise, their first date didn’t go spectacularly wrong. Nothing interfered, not even urgent paperwork, and they found themselves in a diner three blocks from SHIELD with matching plates of pasta. The problem, of course, was that it was easy enough for the agent to leave SHIELD, but surprisingly difficult to stop _being_ an agent.

“That dude is definitely boning her brother,” Clint mumbled around a mouthful of pasta, nodding towards a couple who were obviously on a double date with another couple, two of them clearly siblings. They spent the evening consuming surprisingly good pasta and trading snarky comments about the other patrons, but eventually even Clint could no longer ignore the waitress’ meaningful hints and glares, and they left.

“Walk me home?” Coulson asked, tilting his head in a way that was way too innocent.

“Er,” Clint said, cleverly, because... words.

“Yes,” Coulson drawled, clearly aware of where exactly Clint’s brain had gone, “I am inviting you back to my place for coffee, and by coffee I absolutely mean sex. I’ve been in love with you for far too long to hold back now.”

Something clicked through to the part of Clint’s brain that wasn’t caught up in thoughts of metaphor-sex.

“Yeah?” he asked, slowly, and he probably should have been embarrassed by the slow, sappy smile that spread across his face, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Yes,” Coulson said.

“Why, Agent Coulson, I didn’t know you had it in you,” he teased, because he was too ridiculously happy to try and be circumspect anymore, and Coulson-baiting had always been his favorite game.

“I think,” Coulson said, tugging him over to the side of the walkway, “That you should probably start calling me Phil.”

And then he leaned down and kissed Clint, and nothing in the world had ever been quite so good.

* * *

Clint got used to seeing much less of Coulson after that. Clearly he didn’t want to be around Clint anymore, and Clint could respect that, so he tried to limit himself to dropping by Coulson’s office once a week or so to deliver paperwork, and sitting on the other side of the table from him at Avengers team debriefings. If he spent a little too much time lurking in air ducts and above the ceiling tiles, just listening to Coulson, nobody had to know.

Hill was fucking sneaky, though, and before the week was out the place was secured to hell. He resorted to something he’d sworn never to do, instead.

“I told you you’d never be able to forget me,” the skrull sneered, hideously smug, as Clint pulled a chair up in front of its cell.

“You said you could be anyone I wanted,” Clint said, because this was the _worst idea he’d ever had_ but he was already there so he might as well go through with it.

The skrull laughed. “Why would I bother now?” it asked. “I was still trying to convince you that I was the man you fell in love with, if you’ll remember.”

Clint shrugged. “There’s a requisition form from the bio lab sitting on a table in Hill’s office. Apparently they think dissecting a skrull would assist R&D in developing better weapons against any aliens we might encounter in the future, and they want you. I was going to see if I could get a hold put on it, but…” He held his hands up as if to say, _what can you do?_

The skrull growled at him.

“What do you want?”

“I just… could you be him again, for just… just a few minutes. I just need…” Clint didn’t care if his voice sounded as broken and worn-down as he felt because there, in that moment, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that he _just wanted to hear Coulson’s voice,_ warm and open and his, one more time.

The thing sneered for a brief moment, and then shook its head. Something rippled across its skin, or maybe melted, and Phil stood before him, with that same fond smile on his face and familiar warmth in his eyes.

“I missed you,” it said, gently, and Clint breathed out a sigh that felt like he’d been holding it forever without realizing.

“Missed you too,” he mumbled, burying his head in his hands.

“Do you ever think of what we could have been, if not for Stark’s little accident? We’d have been happy together, I promise, it was never a part of my objective to hurt you. You’d still be with your little SHIELD agent and I’d be free and happy.”

“You’re not him,” Clint grit out, and it hurt, that he wasn’t even sure how truthful he was being. The real, breathing Coulson who could barely stand to look at him—was he really any more real than the thing that had held him in its arms?

“Oh, darling, don’t lie to yourself,” it laughed. “He barely even liked you. Emotions are just as easy to shift as shape; I _loved_ you, and you gave all that away for a pitiful little human who can’t even meet your—”

The door to the detention block banged open, and Coulson, the real one, stepped in. He lifted an eyebrow at the sight of Clint sitting there, in front of the cell, but otherwise concealed any surprise he might have felt.

The skrull was right; Coulson never once met his eyes.

“Barton, what are you doing here?” Coulson asked, and with some difficulty, Clint pulled his smart-ass cloak of armor back ground his raw heart.

“Oh, you know, interrogating the prisoner. I wanted to see if I could get him to be you and make penis jokes. I was gonna record it, would have been great for posterity.”

“Barton.”

“Coulson,” he replied, and Coulson scowled at him, looking... disgusted. Clint fought back the urge to wince, or maybe cry. _God_ , how pathetic Coulson must think he was, and how creepy this had to seem.

“It’s _Agent_ Coulson,” he corrected. “Barton, get out of here, you know you’re not authorized, and I need to interrogate the prisoner.”

A year before, Clint would have made a smartass comment and stuck around. Clint wasn’t feeling up to being the Clint of a year before just then, and he left, quietly.

* * *

_\- 11 Months, 2 Weeks, 3 Days_

It should have felt like they were moving too fast when Clint moved his meager collection of belongings into Phil’s much larger, much more comfortable apartment after just a week, but it just felt like he _belonged._ It only took two weeks before he brought up the subject of getting a dog.

It turned out Phil was allergic to pet dander, so they got an ivy instead.

Phil’s alarm clock gradually went off earlier every day, and Clint pretended not to notice, and they got used to eating breakfast together and sharing showers and fighting over who got the larger share of the sheets. Clint wasn’t a morning person, but Phil learned all the best ways to lure him out of the bed. Without the caffeine pills that he apparently downed like candy Phil could never stay up past eleven at night, so Clint got used to lugging Phil to the bedroom after he fell asleep on his shoulder while they watched tv.

Clint learned to TIVO Supernanny just in case something horrible came up at the last minute and Phil couldn’t talk his way into being allowed to leave SHIELD.

Phil learned to leave space by the bed free for Clint’s bow and quiver in case Clint woke up in the night and needed to reach for them.

They learned to share each other’s nightmares, the best ways to wake each other up without getting an eyeful of fist, and the best ways to talk each other down from old but never-forgotten panic.

It was the happiest Clint had been in his entire life.

* * *

Clint really should have known better than to snoop, but, well, he’d maybe worked alongside Natasha gathering intelligence for a few too many years of his life, and maybe he needed a distraction from reciting ‘Agent Coulson’, ‘Agent Coulson’ over again and again, as if that would make the name stick in his head.

“—off the Avengers team, sir,” he heard Agent Coulson say from his perch in the ceiling. He froze.

“Coulson, I don’t have a single damn person who can even approach the skill you have at herding those damn children. We can’t afford to lose you,” Fury replied, and Clint realized that Agent Coulson was _trying to leave the Avengers._ His stomach clenched. Surely—

“I find that I am unable to continue my association with certain of the members of the team,” Coulson informed him, and god, yeah, _Agent_ Coulson was definitely talking about him. It probably wasn’t one of his better plans, stepping out of nowhere in front of two of the most highly-trained agents SHIELD had, but Coulson didn’t shoot and he managed to dodge the worst of the punch Fury threw.

“Er, sorry,” he said, rubbing the rapidly forming bruise on the side of his cheek. “I, sorry, I overheard. It’s okay.” He looked Fury straight in the eye, because he couldn’t bear to look at Agent Coulson just then. “I would like to formally hand in my resignation from the Avengers. I would like to continue as a regular field agent, but if that is not possible, I accept that. If that is your decision, I should inform you that the civilian reintegration program will be unnecessary. I’m sure,” he twisted his mouth up in a small caricature of his usual cocky grin, “that the circus will still have a place for me. Talk about a money draw; come watch the famous Hawkeye! shoot at impossible targets! and accomplish daring deeds!”

He laughed then, because hey, it was kinda funny when you thought about it. He hoped it didn’t sound as dry and hopeless as it felt.

“Um,” he continued, reaching back to scratch the base of his neck, “Do I have to hand in formal papers or some shit?”

Fury stared at him for several seconds, considering. They might have been the longest seconds of Clint’s entire fucking life.

“Do you think you can fix whatever it is you’ve fucked up with Coulson?” he asked, bluntly.

Heart pounding in his chest, Clint shook his head. “I think the situation is permanent, sir. It certainly looks that way from where I’m standing.” Agent Coulson shifted behind him and made a noise, as if he was going to say something and stopped himself at the last minute. Fury’s gaze flitted behind Clint to Agent Coulson, and then back. Clint still couldn’t look at, at _Phil_ , God.

“A resignation won’t be necessary, Barton,” Fury finally said, looking weary. “I’ll see what I can do about finding a new handler for you. Agent Coulson, I expect to have dossiers for potential replacements on my desk by noon today, or I will demote your ass so hard you won’t be able to sit again for the remainder of your pathetic life.”

“Thank you, sir,” Clint managed to choke out. He caught sight of a corner of Agent Coulson’s mouth, pressed in a hard, thin line, as he turned and fled.

* * *

_\- 6 Months, 3 Days_

“Hey, so, it passed, and it’s legal and all, and I know it hasn’t been that long, but maybe—?” Clint asked Phil one morning, as dim sunlight filtered in through the windows. They had a rare day off, and Clint had completely spoiled the opportunity to properly sleep in by spending the entire night awake trying to convince himself that this was another of his Very Bad Ideas.

“Hm?” Phil hummed from beneath the sheets. Clint sat up, pulling them away to reveal more of the smooth skin of Phil’s torso, only marred by one old bullet wound. He turned over and blinked up at Clint through bleary eyes.

“Marriage. Uh, gay marriage. I was thinking, maybe we could… you know. If you want.”

Phil smiled up at him, his eyes crinkling at the corners the way they only ever did for Clint.

“Maybe in a couple months,” he said, and Clint was on top of the world.


	3. Waking

Clint Barton was more tired than he remembered having been in all his years of living rough and on the wrong side of the law. Certainly more tired than he’d ever been while working for SHIELD.

He hadn’t been back to headquarters in over four months, and even his strangely bubbly and entirely unprofessional new handler was starting to lag. She was good, much better than he’d expected, and he’d inadvertently become friends with her between snarky conversations over secure lines and the massive bags of good old fashioned American hamburgers she liked to bring him after missions. There was one such bag in her hand as she walked through the door of the run-down hotel room, and Clint sighed with relief.

“Thank god,” he said, grabbing for it. She held it well out of his reach and tsked at him.

“Debriefing first. Gotta get my paperwork in on time, you know the rules.”

Clint scowled at her but held out his hand for the necessary sitreps.

“How’d you get the job anyway, Lewis?” he asked, as she secured the hamburgers in a location safe from his stomach and offered him the forms.

“Ooooo, Smith owes me fifty bucks, he bet you’d hold out a year before asking. The answer is, you technically qualify to operate without a handler, but Director Fury wanted someone to keep an eye on you, and I came recommended by a senior agent.”

“Huh,” Clint said, accepting the pen that she handed him next. He began scribbling details of the mission onto the paper. “So they’re sending out some kid to keep an eye on me and get herself killed, that’s new.”

Lewis whacked him gently on the shoulder. “Shut up, Barton. I can take care of myself.” When he’d scribbled his way through the second form, she gave him a burger as a reward, and went back to watching him with her chin propped up on her hands.

“You always seem so sad,” she said, as the pile of papers gradually dwindled.

“You watch too many chick flicks,” Clint responded, on automatic. Not for the first time, he considered hunting down the HR department at SHIELD and blowing up their collective asses for siccing a junior agent on him. At least someone with more experience would have let bygones be bygones and kept out of his personal life.

“They say you left the Avengers because you hated someone on the team so much you couldn’t stand to stay, but…” Lewis added, clearly unconcerned by his obvious attempt to put an end to the conversation. He placed the second-to-last form on the neat stack of completed papers. “You seem so sad, for someone who asked to leave the team.”

“Fuck off,” Clint said, because hey, maybe he hadn’t been direct enough the first time.

“I know you don’t hate anyone on your team,” she continued, and Clint seriously considered blowing the both of them up with the trick arrow sticking out of his quiver at a lopsided angle. “Was it Natasha? Your file says you worked several undercover ops posing as various combinations of sexual partners, and there’s a side note indicating that they believe you to be or have been in a romantic relationship with her outside of mission parameters.”

“I’m not having this talk with you,” Clint ground out, “And Natasha and I are old news, so stop fishing for gossip.” If there was a note about Natasha in his file, there sure as hell was a note about his relationship with skrull-Coulson, and probably even an addendum about the real reason he’d left the team.

“Don’t all agents have this talk with their handlers eventually?” she asked, far too innocently, and Clint was officially going to blow the entire fucking state up if it meant she’d just shut up. “C’mon, Hawkeye, we’ve been together for _months._ You’ve even got your own track on my ipod.”

“Only because I threatened to toss it out of the window if I had to listen to one more Adele song.” He shoved the last, most complicated form into the pile, and stood.

“You like her, don’t lie,” Lewis sniggered, as he finished off the burger remaining in the sack. “She just gives you feels you can’t handle right now so you’re trying to pretend it’s her music you hate.” The _–and not yourself_ went unspoken, and maybe even unthought, but Clint heard it anyway.

If she brought Coulson up, Clint didn’t think he could—

“Hey.” Lewis’ hand settled around his wrist in a tight grip. He couldn’t avoid her eyes as he turned around and tried to tug his arm free. “It gets better with time, yeah?”

And, yeah, it did. He knew somewhere deep in the cockles of his heart that he wasn’t ever going to stop loving Coulson, but he could—someday he’d have it back under control, the memories would fade and Clint would be able to face him without love shining out of his fucking face or whatever and ruining everything for everyone.

He tugged his arm free of her grip just as her phone rang. She picked it up with an abrupt, professional “Lewis,” made agreeable sounds into the speaker, and then hung up.

“Looks like another mission. God, Barton, they really don’t want you back at SHIELD headquarters, huh? I haven’t had a vacation in for-fucking-ever.”

Clint was already moving, shoveling his belongings into bags. “Where and what?” he asked in his most terse, professional voice.

“Uh, the coordinates should be in our mission email. They think it’s HYDRA, they want to send us in to check it out.”

“Alright. I’ll radio for SHIELD to come pick you up, I’m taking the car.”

“Yeah, I’ll—wait, what? Clint, I’m going with you—”

“You just said I technically didn’t need a handler,” he points out, “And I’m not dragging a twenty-four-year-old along behind me to a potential HYDRA base. You’re going back to headquarters and I’m going to check things out.”

“But—”

“Look, Lewis,” he said, turning the full force of his glare on her. It was a shame, because he actually kinda liked her, but this would never work if she knew that. “I don’t want a handler and I certainly don’t want a friend. I don’t want or need _you._ I’m going in alone. See you around.”

Then he hoisted first his duffle bag over one shoulder, strapped his quiver over the other shoulder, and slid his bow into a position where it was hidden by the duffle bag but easily accessible in case he needed it.

“See you around, Lewis,” he said with a casual salute, and he slammed the door behind him on the way out. As he made his way down the derelict hall he could hear her already making frantic phone calls behind him, and he shook his head and trudged down the stairs.

The car was one of the beat up old Toyotas SHIELD used for undercover missions, and Clint drove a lot slower without Coulson’s need for speed or his ability to magically charm cops. Even so, he made good time, and he pulled up to the warehouse he’d been sent to investigate right on time.

(Before, he and Coulson had always been early, and they’d gone out to eat as much junk food as they could find wherever they were, because if they were gonna go it was better to go full of one last pack of powdered donuts.)

He fitted the earpiece in place and listened as it crackled back to life. Fury’s voice echoed over the line, which was actually kinda funny, because he hadn’t personally overseen a solo mission for years.

“I hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” he said. Clint grinned in spite of himself, and slid easily back into his well-practiced habit of mission banter.

“Always, sir. I’m on location, scouting for a point of entry. Annnd, it looks like there’s a broken out window about twenty feet up on the east side. There’s a dumpster that probably hasn’t been emptied since the early seventies, going by the size of the trash heap, which should be scalable. I’ll let you know if I die trying.”

“You’re an ass, Barton,” Fury said, and Clint slipped over to the pile and started climbing. His assessment of the pile’s age might not actually have been that far off, considering its stability. It was easy enough to slip through the window and down onto a rickety catwalk—

“You should probably let me tie you up without struggling too much, because that thing is designed to hold about half your weight, and I think we’d both rather you didn’t crash to your death,” a woman drawled, entirely too close.

It wasn’t the first time he’d fallen for a too-obvious means of entry, which honestly only made it more embarrassing. He turned to face a startlingly green woman pointing a gun at his head. At six inches, she probably wasn’t going to miss.

He held his wrists out and tried to look innocent as he brushed against his homing beacon, activating it. If he got really, really lucky, SHIELD might even find him in time. And even if they didn’t, they’d have a lock on what looked like a major HYDRA base, which was better than nothing.

The thought of dying there, alone, left him strangely hollow and strangely relieved.

The woman held out her free hand and something black and slick leapt up to tangle around his wrists. Bio-tech, probably, which figured. He might have been able to pick a lock. It slithered down his body and wrapped loosely around his ankles, and she reached forward and tugged sharply on the coil binding his wrists, pulling him forward. The catwalk clanked loudly and shook beneath him, and he allowed himself to be pulled onto safer ground.

He could feel the homing beacon pulsing against his skin as she led him roughly into a small, dirty office area, and he fought back the urge to smile. At least he’d done one last thing right.

She set him down in the chair and held him at gunpoint while the rope-creature squiggled around him and formed a set of ropes binding the length of his body tightly to the chair. Clint was pretty sure he ought to be making quips about kinks, but he just… felt too tired to bother. The computer systems looked pretty complex; he might even had managed to weasel his way into the main base. They could potentially take HYDRA down once and for all with the information they could find here.

Clint had done his part. He was so tired and when this was all over…

Well, it would be a rest of sorts.

He waited for the masked thugs to come in and start the beating. Instead, the woman smiled, pulled up another chair, and then seated herself primly in front of him.

She reached out a taloned finger and stroked a neat line down the curve of his bicep.

“Such a shame,” she murmured, and then she looked up to meet his stare with poisonous green eyes. “That agent of yours doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Clint tried to shrug despite the restraints.

“No matter. Men!”

Two burly men stomped into the room, like something out of a bad crime flick.

“Leave his hands. They might be useful to us,” she said as she stood. She shot one last look at Clint with cold, cold eyes, and left the room.

The blows rained down, and eventually the blackness took him.

Time passed. He thought he might have dreamt something happy, and he woke feeling almost warm.

“How would you like a place under my wing?” the woman’s voice asked, and Clint realized he’d been woken by a light kick to the gut.

“And you haven’t even told me your name yet,” he snarked, and hoped that it sounded less like a pained moan to her than it did to him.

“You can call me Madame.” She sounded amused. “Is that a yes, little hawk?”

“Don’t be stupid, of course it’s not. The answer’s no.” Being rude to the person who had him tied to a chair was not really high on the list of things likely to keep his ass alive, but then, that wasn’t the point.

“Don’t be so hasty. Even we hear gossip,” she continued, with a thin-lipped smile. “They say you left the Avengers because you loathed one among them so very much that you couldn’t stand it, but your eyes tell a different story. Instead of the standard practice of returning you to your former handler, they found you a new one, and such a child at that, and there were rumors before one of your own was revealed to be an infiltrator. Tell me, little hawk, were you in love with that handsome agent of yours?”

Clint snarled up at her. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it!”

“To do with what, dear?” she asked, sounding disgustingly amused. For a moment, Clint considered bucking against his chair, fighting to get free so that he could _punch her in the face_ for mentioning Phil to him, and then he sagged back.

“Agent Clint Barton of SHIELD,” he began the familiar mantra, closing his eyes. For a moment, the skrull-as-Phil flickered to life in his memory, repeating his own version of the words, and then he continued. “I am here on a general recon mission, my sensors detected anomalous reading signatures in the area. I came to investigate further.”

She hissed with displeasure.

“So scared that you have to fall back on the routines of new agents, little hawk?” she demanded, snide.

“—here on a general recon mission—”

She slapped him, hard, across the face.

“—came to investigate further. Agent Clint Barton of SHIELD—”

“What would you say if I swore to string your little pet agent up in the rafters and let you do what you wanted to him? He’ll never love _you,_ you sad little runaway circus boy, not on his own. I can promise you his cock, on or off his body, I can promise you the chance to do _anything you want…_ ”

Clint broke the mantra with a growl. “Don’t you lay a fucking finger on him!” he roared.

She matched him, tone for tone. “You’d stand up for a pathetic little agent who only joined SHIELD because he believed in some half-assed ideal of heroes? One who never even loved, never even _liked_ you? I’ve run into you before, little hawk, I’ve seen the way your eyes light up when he’s near you, and I’ve seen him deflect it because he. couldn't. care. less. about. you. And you still defend him!”

“Look,” Clint snarled. “I get it. I _get it,_ I’m a _circus freak,_ whatever! I swear to god if you lay so much as a finger on him, I will tear your fucking intestines out with my bare hands and make you _eat them._ ”

“I am offering you _everything you could want,_ even that pathetic little excuse for a human being you want so badly, and you are throwing it back in my face!”

“I DON’T WANT HIM IF HE DOESN’T WANT ME!”

And then the door banged open and for half a second Clint saw him, mouth hanging open in an unguarded way Clint hadn’t seen since the skrull had worn his face. There was an impossibly loud bang and, for just a moment, a searing sense of pain, and then Clint was lost to the darkness once again.

He dreamt again. Phil is there—Natasha sings to him and it’s beautiful, which is funny because he knows for a fact that her singing voice could compete with mating cats—Phil comes by again, and this time he presses a chaste kiss against Clint’s forehead—Steve comes in and sets a dozen purple kittens on the bed and explains, very solemnly, that they are his children with Tony and he needs Clint to babysit because Clint has the biggest nose—Phil comes again, this time with a huge bunch of roses, and gets down on one knee and proposes and Clint tries to explain that he can’t marry him because he’s a skrull—

And then finally, Clint woke up enough to be certain that he was awake and not dreaming. There weren’t any flowers in the room, let alone roses.

He barely had time to shift in search of the nurses’ button before Natasha strode into the room. She wasn’t smiling, exactly, but the look on her face was warm.

“You’re awake,” she said, in a way that managed to imply both _welcome back_ and _I missed you._

“Guess so,” he replied, and his voice came out as _the most miserable croak_ he’d ever heard in his life. Natasha handed him a cup of ice chips before he could ask, and he nibbled on them.

“SHIELD medical?” he asked, when he had finished.

“Yeah. We almost got you out of there in one piece, but Hulk took issue with a particular insult one of the lackeys threw at him and smashed a wall down on top of you.”

Fear flooded through him and he immediately began running a mental check on all his various appendages. Natasha, apparently realizing what he was thinking, chuckled.

“You’re still in one piece, Clint, stand down.”

He shot her a sheepish look and burrowed down deeper in the sheets.

“It was a major base, you did a lot of good by finding them and alerting us that we were in fact dealing with HYDRA, as we suspected.” Her gaze turned sharp, and Clint preemptively winced as she continued, “And no, that doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass for going in there alone the moment you’re back on your feet. Why did you send Agent Lewis away?”

He was a mediocre liar at best, and much worse when it came to Natasha. He shrugged, and winced when it stretched bruised muscles. “I didn’t want her getting hurt,” he admitted, and she sighed.

“Clint, you’re a fucking idiot.”

She leaned over and pressed a kiss against his forehead, and his mind flashed back to the dream of Phil—Coulson— _Agent_ Coulson doing the same. He fucking hated pain medication, because he could never tell dreams apart from reality while it was in his system.

“I’m your favorite idiot, though,” he offered, meekly. Natasha snorted.

“Get better. I have some meetings I need to be in.” She looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to whine that she was supposed to stay by his side and monitor his recovery, but Clint was so, so tired. He closed his eyes and let himself drift to sleep.

He half woke up to the sound of arguing voices around him.

“Phil?” he asked, and the voices fell quiet, and once again he slipped into sleep.

They weaned him off the medication and explained his injuries to him (broken rib, cracked humerus, fractured clavicle, muscle damage and a fortunately mild concussion) slowly over the following week. Two days in he began pestering them to let him leave, but was met with the same insistence that he was on mandatory bed rest.

On day four Natasha told him they’d benched him pending psychiatric evaluation.

“Coulson had to fight to keep them from pouncing on you the moment you woke up,” she explained, dryly, and made note of Clint’s flinch with a raised eyebrow. “He knows how you get on hydrocodone.”

“Yeah,” Clint agreed noncommittally. He was still tired and this was not a talk he particularly wanted to have when he didn’t have full control of his mouth.

“You should talk to him, you know,” she said, standing up.

“Haven’t seen him,” he replied, and she frowned and hummed.

She stayed for longer than he might have expected. She was still there, sharing his company, when he fell asleep again.

They let him go after nearly two weeks in medical with a small mountain of paperwork regarding mandatory psychological evaluation. Clint very deliberately accidentally dumped it in a trash bin, with some difficulty as his arm was in a sling and the entire right side of his body was _dying,_ as he stalked through Headquarters. His feet carried him towards the main office block and he nearly made the automatic turn towards Agent Coulson’s office, but—

“Barton! You were supposed to be in your debriefing half an hour ago, what the fuck are you doing here?”

He turned towards Lewis, who was… grinning at him?

“Sorry. No one mentioned,” he replied, flatly.

“Room six, get your ass in there before Fury hunts me down and decides to blame me.”

He scowled at her, but did as she said. It was something to do besides think about how much his life _sucked_ and how much he really just wanted to curl back up in that hospital bed and sleep some more. He slipped into the room, letting the door bang shut behind him, and stared at Coulson with his mouth hanging slightly open.

“Uh,” he said, wondering with something like panic whether he had the right room. Some other time, _any_ other time, he could have dealt with this, but—

“Clint,” Phil said, and _God,_ his name still sounded so ridiculously perfect coming from that mouth. He sat down, slowly, in one of the chairs.

“Agent Coulson,” he replied tentatively, and Coulson’s mouth drew together in an even tighter line.

“Your behavior in the recent investigation of HYDRA was foolish, reckless, and endangered SHIELD’s initiative, in addition to breaking no less than seven of the protocols set forth in the mission debriefing.”

Despite himself, Clint relaxed into the old, familiar rhythm of being debriefed by a very irritated Coulson.

“Skimmed it,” he said, and maybe his grin was nervous and half-hearted, but it was still a grin.

“Not only did you force Agent Lewis to overlook mandatory breaks between missions, you then stranded her without transportation and recklessly took off on your own.”

“Hey, I left her with a phone!”

“Why?” Coulson asked.

“Uh, because I didn’t want to _strand_ her.”

Coulson scowled at him. “Why did you go into a suspected HYDRA base without backup or even—or even _telling_ anyone.” There was something not quite professional in his tone, and in spite of himself, Clint found himself hoping. _You should talk to him,_ Natasha had said.

“You did send me,” Clint said, quietly.

“I did no such thing.” Coulson seemed to be gathering himself, and Clint—didn’t want that. Also, his mouth had always been kind of completely disconnected from his brain.

“I thought I was going to die and I didn’t want Lewis to get caught up in my shit,” he blurted. Coulson stared at him.

“You thought you were going to die,” he said, flatly.

“I, uh, I wanted to be useful, just once. I didn’t… think I had anything to live for.” Clint felt like he was three years old, admitting to his mother that he’d been the one to paint the bathroom mirror with toothpaste.

Coulson sat at the other end of the table, lips tightly pressed together and hands clenched on the tabletop.

Clint bit his lip, and went for it.

“Do, I mean, do I have anything to, uh, live for?” It came out as a whisper, but he knew that Coulson had heard because he abruptly stood, shoving his chair out of the way.

“You stupid—” Coulson choked out, and he swept around the table and latched around Clint.

For the first time in nearly a year, Clint felt like he could _breathe._ He let the moment linger, savoring the feel of being in Phil’s arms again, and then he pulled away.

“You spent months refusing to look me in the eye. You told me to call you _Agent Coulson,_ ” Clint pointed out. Coulson sighed and buried his head in the crook of Clint’s neck.

“You made me _hope._ I couldn’t do it anymore,” he said, words muffled against Clint’s skin.

Clint’s eyes fluttered closed against his own volition.

“I thought someone had told you about, about, uh, me and the… skrull-you, and I thought maybe I’d made things awkward and I just… you seemed so uncomfortable with it, with me, and then you were going to _leave the team_ and it was all my fault…” The words came rushing out, and Clint’s breath stopped as Phil pulled away.

For a heartbeat, it looked like Phil might try to explain. Instead, he replied, very quietly and very steadily. “Natasha was the first to tell me, several weeks after you left. Sometimes, after, you would look at me and I would think that maybe it could work out, but you always take what you want, and in all the years we’ve worked together, you never… well. I didn’t dare to hope, and you made me want to. And then I made a poor decision after a mission because I was _biased,_ you understand, and I realized it wasn’t fair to the team to work under a handler who would put the welfare of one of them above the welfare of the others. And you are more than welcome to begin calling me Phil again.”

Finished, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to Clint’s forehead. Clint made a choked sort of noise somewhere deep in his throat and surged up to meet Phil’s lips with his own. He maybe sort of lost some time there, but eventually, he pulled away.

“Okay,” he said, pressing their foreheads together. “Okay.”

* * *

_\+ 2 years, 3 months, 4 days_

He started the morning in Phil’s obscenely comfortable bed, his arms wrapped around Phil’s warm body as he bit Phil’s shoulder in an attempt to wake him up. Phil groaned and pulled away, and Clint gleefully rolled him over for a kiss, because Phil would grumble about morning breath and _what the fuck, Clint?_ later. It took the promise of a shower to lure Phil away from the bed, and the warm water and a bit of messy, slow kissing did the rest.

Phil made both of them omelets that could have come straight from a cookbook while Clint hunted down all the things they needed to take to work. Clint threw little bits of red bell pepper at him while they ate, because Phil should have figured out by then that Clint hated them. They fought over who would drive the car to work that morning as they dressed, and Clint won by pinging his ring against Phil’s forehead to get his attention, and then kissing him and threatening to test his ability to drive and receive a blow job at the same time if he insisted on being in charge.

He was going to spend every morning for the rest of his life just like this.

* * *

(He did.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [katobeth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/katobeth) for betaing, and [coffeesuperhero](http://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero) for having ~pheeeels~ with me and cheerleading when I needed it :D You are both super awesome!


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